Ghosts of Revolutions Past and Warnings of Futures to Come

 Have ever been listening to someone talk and have déjà vu, despite the fact that you’ve never seen or heard of the person speaking, and the interview you’re watching happened just a few hours ago?  I have. Once.  A couple of weeks ago.

I was listening to Tucker interview Xi Van Fleet, a Chinese native who lived through the Cultural Revolution in China.  She eventually immigrated to the United States and has lived here for 40 years.  As I’m listening to her talk about how the Cultural Revolution rolled out and how she was seeing many of the same things here I couldn’t help but think that I’d heard something close to this before.

And then it hit me, I had.  Exactly 40 years ago a defector from the Soviet Union, Yuri Bezmenov did an interview about how the KGB was using what they called Ideological Subversion to collapse the United States.

Now these two interviews weren’t remotely the same.  One was from an KGB operative, someone who was part of the suppression of the Russian people who became disillusioned and defected to the west while the other is from someone who experienced the suppression of the CCP and eventually immigrated to the US. 

Nonetheless, given exactly 40 years apart, the two interviews taken together paint a very stark picture of America today and going forward.  They reminded me of a technique that is often recommended for effective public speaking: “Tell them what you’re going to tell them.  Tell them.  Then tell them what you’ve just told them.”

Bezmenov lays out the KGB’s plan – Ideological subversion – for sowing the collapse of America – and western Europe as well.   It involved 4 elements. He lays each one out in detail, or at least three of them while 3# is obvious.

1)      1) Demoralization – 15-20 years.  Time to re-educate one generation.

This is done through uncritically introducing the Marxist ideology into schools without counterbalancing it with basic American values, patriotism, and morals. Eventually a significant segment of the population will become immune to accurate information. 

2)      2) Destabilization – 2 – 5 years to destabilize a nation.

The goal is to destabilize the nation via the economy, foreign relations, and defense policy. 

3)      3) Crisis – as short as 6 weeks to bring a nation to crisis. (George Floyd anyone…)

4)     4) Normalization – For this one I’ll let Bezmenov’s words speak for themselves:

“This is what will happen in the United States if you allow all the schumcks to bring the country to crisis, to promise people all kind of goodies and paradise on earth.  To destabilize your economy and illuminate the principle of free market competition and to put a big brother government in Washington DC with benevolent dictators like Walter Mondale. 

Your leftists in the United States, all the professors and the beautiful civil rights defenders, they are instrumental in the process of the subversion.  Only to destabilize the nation.  When their job is completed, they are not needed anymore.  They know too much.  Some of them, when they get disillusioned, when they see that Marxists / Leninists come power they get offended they think they will come to power.  That will never happen of course.  They will be lined up against the wall and shot.”

That last sentence is particularly interesting because it’s exactly what Xi Van Fleet says happened in China, twice.  The first was the peasants who put Mao in power in the first place.  They were repaid for their efforts by being chained to their farms and between 1958 and 1962 fifty million of them starved to death.  Then, in 1969 three years after the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Mao turned on his Red Guards, the children, literally, who were his stormtroopers and had the military either kill them or send them to re-education camps. 

Her story is a tragic one, but as she walks through it you hear echoes of exactly what is happening in America today.  For Mao, after 16 years of brainwashing the children he sent them (the Red Guards) out to terrorize the nation.  Violence was used, but also the control of the language. Suddenly propaganda was everywhere.  Everything old had to be destroyed while law and order was dismantled and the police were told to stay out of the schools, which were the beating heart of the Revolution, and additionally, if any of the Red Guards struck them, the police were prohibited from reacting. 

All of this resembles the indoctrination of two generations of American students in the fiction of Climate Change, the gay and trans agendas, as well as the manipulation of language and discourse via the prohibition of words and ideas. The tearing down of statues. The defund the police movement, the violence after George Floyd and the lack of consequences for criminal behavior are exactly as Xi described.

Whether it’s climate activists, supporters of Palestine – AKA antisemites, LBTQXYZ123# harassers or Antifa & BLM rampaging through cities, they’re all playing their parts in the play written by the KGB and taken over by western Communists after the Berlin Wall collapsed.  What’s more, both of these refugees from tyranny discuss what America is becoming, he predicted it and she’s chronicling it. Whether it’s reporters being arrested or protesters being sent to the gulag, or rich / popular opponents of the regime being harassed via lawfare, the rules never apply to those in power.  It’s not that there are no rules, they just don’t matter.  The Soviets had a constitution that guaranteed a wide variety of civil liberties, and the Chinese constitution guarantees "citizens of the People's Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession, and of demonstration." We have our Constitution which provides about as much of a limit on government as a spaghetti strainer does on water.    

The funny thing (as in not really funny) about all of this is that the leftists who think they’re going to be running things once the crisis blossoms into a full blown tyranny will likely be the first to go.  Whether Stalin’s erstwhile supporters who fell in the Great Purge or the Chinese Red Guards who fell to the guns of the military, those who are at the vanguard of leftist revolutions often find themselves victims of the very power they put in place. 

As we watch our great cities devolve into crime infested dystopian nightmares, as we watch George Soros impelled DAs and prosecutors smile as they demonstrate their two tiered legal system, as we watch as the federal government actively subverts efforts to secure the border and cities cut services to citizens and veterans in order to gift illegals billions, as we watch schools and hospitals and states empower the brainwashing and butchering of children, and a we watch powerlessly as the Uniparty in Washington runs up trillion dollar deficits and sends tens of billions to Ukraine, we begin to recognize what Bezmenov called Normalization.  A decade ago Americans of most stripes would have understood that all of this was a disaster in the making.  But now we’re told that all of it is not only normal, but you’re a racist, homophobic, transphobic white nationalist if you disagree with any of it. 

The outcome in November will decide which path we take.  The thing to remember when we walk into those voting booths is that Bezmenov and Xi had a place to escape to for freedom, America.  We don’t have that luxury.  Vote accordingly.

The Persecution of Donald Trump Means Turning Ordinary Activities Into Crimes

In December 2020 I had to put my home on the market and move 1,000 miles away.  Two months before I’d considered refinancing my mortgage and the bank gave me a valuation of $285,000. I thought it probably should have been higher but didn’t really feel like taking the time to look into it because I wasn’t really that worried about it. 

Suddenly in December I was forced to worry about it.  So I reached out to a realtor friend (an actual realtor, not a guy with a side gig) and asked him to give me an estimate. He thought it would probably sell for about $305,000, maybe $315,000 tops.  Again I was skeptical so I started doing my own research.  I looked at my community, what was available in my county, what comparable houses were selling for and taking note of the neighborhoods, roadways, schools etc. After all of that I estimated my house was worth about $400,000.  I thought it could possibly sell for $415,000 or even a bit more.

We put it on the market at $405,000 and ten days later it was sold with the buyers offering $395,000 and we eventually settled for $400,000. I was confident it could have sold for more but exigent circumstances made the logistics of waiting impossible, which is sad because had I waited 12 months to sell it I would likely have gone for $550,000, almost twice what I’d been originally offered.

All of this to say that in the world of real estate there are a million different factors that go into valuing something and based on those criteria, there are likely countless different values that can be set on a particular property. What’s more, values can be volatile particularly in the high end markets. 

Real estate, like most businesses, can be unpredictable, sometimes very much so. Which makes what NY AG Letitia James has done to Donald Trump so unconscionable. In the primary element of James’ indictment: “’Trump and his company used “false and misleading” financial statements, her lawsuit alleged, “repeatedly and persistently to induce banks to lend money to the Trump Organization on more favorable terms than would otherwise have been available to the company, to satisfy continuing loan covenants, and to induce insurers to provide insurance coverage for higher limits and at lower premiums.’”

One would imagine that some banks or insurance companies lost money because they loaned money to Trump or trump defaulted on them.  They did not. Indeed the loans were all paid back, with interest.  There were literally no victims and banks still wanted to lend to him!

But that didn’t matter.  The bottom line is that, according to James, Trump used one set of books for getting a loan and another set of books for taxes. But that’s not how this works. 

When I was selling my house the county tax collector assessed my home at around $200,000.  It had been that way for years.  Indeed, it’s very common, particularly in red states where they concern themselves with controlling taxes, for the government assessment of the value of a property to be substantially below what it might sell for.  That didn’t impact what I might refinance it for or what a buyer might pay for it.  In those cases the lender sends someone out to do an inspection and then comes to its own conclusion as to what value it would be willing to assign the property for the purposes of a loan. 

In the case of Trump, in 2011 the local property assessor in Palm Beach County had valued his Mar-a-Lago property at $18 million then $27.6 million in 2021.  AJ James indicted Trump because he valued the property at higher valuations during this time, up to $739 million for collateral purposes, and therefore using a fraudulent valuation to obtain loans he wouldn’t otherwise get.  But here’s the thing, according to a banker involved in the transaction, the bank followed its own guidelines to make the loans, stating “I think we expect clients-provided information to be accurate. At the same time, it’s not an industry standard that these statements be audited. They’re largely reliant on the use of estimates,” so bankers routinely “make some adjustments.” To highlight the disparity, this past December a high end Palm Beach real estate broker stated that in 2021 Mar-a-Lago would have been worth slightly more than $1 billion and likely would have valued it at $655 million in 2011. 

The point here is that Trump was simply doing the same thing that millions of homeowners and businesses do every single day across the country. They make the best case scenario for the value of their property of business while knowing that a banker or lender is going to make their own determinations before deciding how much they will lend.

That’s business. Valuations are just estimates and they can be all over the map in business.  In 2000 Spanish telephone company Terra bought the search engine Lycos for $12 billion.  They unloaded it three years later for $95 million at a loss of 99%! Alternatively, in 1999 founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin offered to sell Google to Alta Vista for $750,000.  George Bell the CEO demurred.  The company went public in 2004 with a valuation of $23 billion and today Google is worth almost $2 trillion. 

The point is, valuations are guesses, educated or otherwise and everyone has their own perspective.  But James has taken this ordinary element of business and twisted it to try and eviscerate the presidential campaign of Donald Trump.

And she might succeed.  First Judge Arthur Engoron came back with a guilty verdict and last Friday he fined Trump almost half a billion dollars. And what’s worse, because of course it’s New York, he may have to put up the entire amount before he can appeal. 

America’s justice system has been twisted into a hammer with which to nail enemies of the swamp to the wall.  Not only have we seen the laughable election manipulation case in Georgia, the ludicrous defamation case in New York, and the on hold federal election interference case, but we now have the justice system being used to turn normal, everyday activities that millions of Americans partake in on a regular basis and turning them into crimes.  And what’s worse, the system is set up such that if someone is deemed guilty they essentially have to bankrupt themselves in order to be able to seek an appeal. That’s the definition of unjust. If this stands America as we know it is finished. You can’t unring a bell and precedent is precedent.  If this works and Trump loses as a result of this judicial interference onslaught then one would expect recriminations and counter recriminations. And it won’t just be billionaire ex presidents who’ll be in the crosshairs, it will be small businesses who don’t support local candidates, it will be big businesses who threaten the elites and it just might be you and me for having written something critical of some thin skinned politician somewhere or overestimated the value of our house… None of that is good for a free republic.